What does qualitative research primarily focus on?

Qualitative research is fundamentally concerned with understanding the complexities of human experiences, perspectives, and social contexts. It achieves this by exploring non-numerical data such as interviews, focus groups, observations, and open-ended surveys. The aim is to gain insights into people's feelings, motivations, behaviors, and the meanings they attach to their experiences. This approach allows researchers to capture the depth and richness of human experiences, which quantitative methods, focused on numerical data and statistical analysis, often cannot accomplish.

In contrast, other options focus on aspects such as numerical data trends, financial profitability, or efficiency metrics—none of which align with the primary goals and methodologies of qualitative research. Rather, these approaches are characteristic of quantitative research or operational evaluations that seek to measure and assess performance using concrete figures and statistical relationships. Thus, the emphasis on non-numerical data to explore and understand human relationships and social dynamics distinctly defines qualitative research.